Bioethics Student Presentation

Daniel Lipford, a Bioethics Master of Arts graduate student, has been accepted to give an oral presentation at the Comics and Medicine, 2014 Baltimore conference at Johns Hopkins University on June 26-28, 2014. His presentation, entitled “Embodied Harmony: Uniting Body and Self in Comics,” is about the ways people use narratives to cope with illness, particularly comics. Rita Charon argues that illness splinters the identity of the ill into what she calls the story told by “the body” and the story told by “the self.” Telling illness narratives is largely the process of harmonizing those two stories. Following Charon’s distinction, comics are uniquely powerful illness narratives because they naturally require the visual embodiment of both the story of the self and the story of the body. When this embodiment occurs, the self and the body are united on the page–the chaos of illness is turned into embodied harmony.